I made a wish, wrote a letter to Santa...

[Shachar Shemesh]

Being Jewish, and growing up in a Jewish majority environment, I don't 
connect much to the spirit of christmas. Sorry.

However, I do have the vague recollection that Santa brings presents to 
boys who have been good. I don't see how sending the same message over 
and over and over again can be considered "Good". You may be shooting 
yourself in the foot here.

                Shachar

Subhobroto Sinha wrote:

>With XMas nearing, I thought it was time I made my yearly wish to Santa - that he would let his elves use C++ in WINE.
>
>(Just in case, you did not know Santa's email address, it's 'julliard[at]winehq.org', and you can make your wishes at 'wine-devel[at]winehq.com'..)
>
>You see, Santa was always so good - he answered people's prayers and got together his obedient elves to run Win32 on Non-Windows platforms!
>
>However, soon many of his elves found out that technologies like MFC, WTL, ATL, COM, DCOM, COM+ and other MS bloops were getting too complex to be implemented using plain C, and thus developments in those areas were soon in limbo.
>But that could be solved using yet another language called C++ - if only Santa would let it be.
>
>Oh please Santa ! Let us adultrate WINE with C++, please.
>
>It's not that we will rewrite everything in C++ once we get the green signal - things like the loader, scheduler, and most of the Win32 SDK does not need C++ at all, but what about MFC, COM, OLE ?
>
>Not that I expect to compile native MFC source using WineLib, but at least we can write the runtimes so that native MFC apps can atleast run under WINE ?
>
>DirectX oozes of classes,inheritance,abstaction and everything C++ as does OLE, COM and already our implementations have structure object pointers running wild, whereas encapsulation would have done away with it !
>
>As a simple explanation, we might take our 'This' hack wheras C++ would let have us use it as 'this' without even us worrying about it !
>Also, there are many places in shell32, ole and shwlapi (I cannot comment on DirectX source as I do not have a graphics base at all ..) where initializing a few member variables from a constructor would have done away with some redundancy.
>
>Most of the time we are passing around multilevel pointers when a simple reference would have done:
>
>For example a call like
>
>Stream_LoadString( stm, unicode, &This->sString ); [To 'static HRESULT Stream_LoadString( IStream* stm, BOOL unicode,LPWSTR *pstr )']
>
>can be made to a simple
>
>Stream_LoadString(sString);
>
>using C++ if we had the prototype rewritten to 'static HRESULT Stream_LoadString(LPWSTR& pstr )' and making it a member function of IStream (and thus the 'IStream* stm' and 'BOOL unicode' would be member variables..)
>
>We have code like that all over the place whenever COM etc comes into play and "That's Not A Good Thing(TM)" !
>
>Please give us the green card - alternately, a new test branch may also be created just to see if C++ would work.All C++ based modfications would goto that tree.
>If that test branch works and delivers, it maybe merged into the main WINE tree, otherwise if it fails 
>  
>


-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Open Source integration & consulting
Home page & resume - http://www.shemesh.biz/